Cherry Lips and Broken Dreams
by Cimrene
Summary: Told in flashback, an older Wendy, having decided her adventures as a child were just fantasies, falls for a vaguely familiar man. Just to warn, the spacing is completely messed up, I'll fix it soon.


... He turned as he left, pausing on the window for one last look at Wendy, both sickening and fascinating to him.  
  
And that's when Wendy's husband came to the door.  
  
It had been so long, and he looked so different, and Peter was not known for his memory, but he knew.  
  
"Wendy," He cried, "Wendy, look out!"  
  
But Wendy turned and looked at her husband lovingly as he put one arm around her shoulder. "I'm sorry Peter," She said, her voice high, regretful. "He's my husband now, I love him."  
  
"No!" He screamed, turning away from the window sill and leaping into the air. Wendy's betrayal echoed in throughout his body and he screamed again, his cry primal, as if, in feeling the pain he had run from all his life, he had lost all sense of anything human.  
  
And then he fell, his slim body seeming to hang in the air for a moment as Wendy saw him lose all strength, then dropping towards the street below.  
  
Wendy broke away from her husband and ran to the window, tears streaming down her cheeks; she clutched the window sill, looking down onto the street below.  
  
Jane was beside her in a minute, wrapping her small hands around her mother's hair, she too, looking down at the still form of the boy she had heard so much about but never been able to know.  
  
Her husband joined them, embracing his crying wife and daughter. His eyes though, looked down at the street, and a small smile formed on his lips.  
  
The snow began to fall over the body of the boy, covering it from passersby, and with a final look, Wendy Agrafe allowed her husband James to lead her and their daughter back into the house.  
  
. . .  
  
All little girls grow up, and Wendy was no exception to the rule. In a few years she had grown from the wildly imaginative child Peter had known into a beautiful, spirited young woman. Time had tamed her dreams, while she still thought of them now and then, they had become more childish fancies that goals, she would laugh them off and return to the life she had grown into. And if she ever cried over them, no one ever saw.  
  
She had found fast that young men were not interested by tales, that they shied away from riddles, and that they frowned upon any attempts she made at intelligent conversation. The sharp tongue she developed as she grew older was quickly subdued as she learned that speaking her mind would only cause her trouble. And so, for the sake of her family, and for herself, Wendy Moira Angela Darling became a proper young lady.  
  
That is, until she met James Agrafe.  
  
It was the winter of her seventeenth year when she first saw him, although first may be incorrect, for from the moment she laid eyes on him she was sure she had seen him before, in a dream perhaps, a misbegotten fantasy, he seemed to lay within some part of her memory that rested right beyond her grasp.  
  
She knew him in the same sort of way that prickled in the back of him mind when one of her brothers said something odd. Her brothers... there were a pile of them, nearly all adopted. She remembered their adoption of course, but somehow had become jumbled in her memory, no doubt with another of her silly fantasies, she would tell herself. She never did ask what really happened though, as if it was too painful to let go of that frivolous flight of the imagination.  
  
He was one of those, another extravagant concoction of her child's brain, she thought, although she didn't see how he could be, because he was real, certainly real. And as she watched him from across the crowded parlor of a colleague of her father's she laughed to herself, amused that she could even dream that such a man had ever graced the field of her dreams.  
  
He saw her stare, witnessed her silent laugh, and he smiled to himself, knowing that he had gotten exactly what he wanted.  
. . .  
  
James Hook was a shrewd man; the loneliness he had faced even among his dimwitted crew had taught him that. And he wasn't easily done away with. Even in the face of his greatest fear, his greatest defeat, some part of him had retained that shrewdness, and, in the belly of the crocodile who had once stolen his very hand, he somehow managed to remain alive.

Some might call it a miracle, but Hook was not one of them. It was his own victory, and if any higher power had claimed right to it, he would have faced them down, once he was out of the Croc's belly and back on land at least.

He spent five days sitting in the cramped belly of that beast before he escaped. The Croc, worn out from having his meal not do what it was supposed to and come out the other end, was all too grateful to allow him free passage back through his throat. And thus did the once Captain James Hook escape certain death.

Once he was out he found his thirst for revenge replenished anew. But Hook's stay in the Croc's belly had inspired a new sense of vengeance on him, and now a new Hook, bereft of both ship and crew, decided, instead of running off with sword in hand to fight his greatest foe, to plot.

So he stormed off to his Black Castle, one of the few places still untouched by Peter Pan, and he proceeded to plot for four years.

Much to his dismay Hook was quick to find that all plans had been tried, all courses taken, and he was left to brood in the Castle on a plan that it seemed impossible to form.

But one day, nearly five years after he was expelled from the gullet of the Croc a new plan began to form in his mind. It was a plan that was both difficult and cunning, but one that would in the end meet his goal: if he could not take Peter he would take the only thing Peter loved.  
. . .  
  
As Wendy sat in that parlor, laughing at the oddness of life, James Agrafe thought over these things in his head. And, once he was sure of his course of action, he made his move.


End file.
